The sinking of the ARA GENERAL BELGRANO

CL-46 USS Phoenix (1938-51)/ C-4 ARA Diecisiete de Octubre (1951-56)/ ARA General Belgrano (1956-82)

Built 1935-38 at New York Shipbuilding, USS Phoenix was one of nine Brooklyn Class light cruisers built for the US Navy. She was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor, where she escaped damage and first developed a reputation for being a 'lucky ship." The cruiser saw extensive action in the Pacific during WWII, earning 9 battlestars.

USS Phoenix escapes Pearl Harbor to search for the Japanese fleet.

The ship was laid up in July of 1946, and sat in mothballs until 1951. She was sold to Argentina, and following a six-moth refit entered service as C-4 ARA Diecisiete de Octubre (Cruiser number 4, "the 17th of October", after an important date in Argentine politics). She was renamed General Belgrano in 1956.

The ship provided valuable service for nearly three decades, not unusual for Brooklyn class cruiser in a South American navy: Boise served with Argentina until 1979, Philadelphia and St Louis served with Brazil until 1973 and 1975 respectively, and Nashville and Brooklyn served with Chile until 1984 and 1992. In the 1970's Belgrano was modernized and fitted with British anti-aircraft missiles to supplement her guns.

In 1982, the brutal Videla dictatorship of Argentina was facing growing opposition and civil unrest. In a desperate attempt to distract the people from domestic problems and instill them with nationalistic spirit, the military rulers occupied the Falkland Islands on April 2, ending 150 years of British rule over these islands. The British rapidly assembled a task force and set sail for the South Atlantic to retake the islands by force, while President Belaunde Terry of Peru hosted intense negotiations between the two nations, in an effort to reverse the invasion without bloodshed. The British declared a 200-mile 'exclusion zone' around the islands, and sent submarines to the area to enforce the blockade and prevent the Argentines from landing more troops and equipment on the islands. The public often misunderstands, thinking that ships outside the 'exclusion zone' were save from attack, but this is not the case: ANY ship or plane in the zone WOULD be attacked without question, while ships and aircraft outside the zone COULD be attacked. The British clarified this possition when they used the Swiss Embasy to warn the Argentine government that any ship or aircraft that threatened the British task force would be attacked even if it was outside the war zone.

The Argentine Navy launched an ambitious operation, to project their power around the Falklands and perhaps even catch the incoming British task force and take it under attack before it was ready. Task Force 79 was formed, and disposed into three groups. Task Force 79.1 was the carrier 25 de Mayo, while 79.2 was her escort of two British built Type 42 destroyers, Hercules and Santisima Trinidad. Force 79.3 was the Belgrano and two escorting destroyers, and Force 79.4 consisted of 3 frigates. Force 79.4 sailed South of the Falklands, where it played no part in the following week's events, and was recalled to base May 2. 79.1 & 2 sailed north of the Falklands, where they found nothing but misfortune. First, Santisima Trinidad's Lynx helicopter crashed. Then the force was detected by a British Sea Harrier (no 801). Hercules attempted to launch a Sea Dart missile against it, but the launcher would not fire so the Sea Harrier escaped unscathed. Finally, 25 de Mayo was unable to launch her Skyhawk attack planes to locate and attack the British, as the carrier was too short to operate the aircraft without a significant head wind, and it was an unusually calm day in the South Atlantic. Having been discovered by an enemy they could not themselves locate, the Argentine Navy called off the operation and turned for home.

Task Force 79.3's part was not nearly as uneventfull. On April 26, 1982, the Belgrano left Ushuaia with her two escorting destroyers, the Piedra Buena (D-29) and the Hipolto Bouchard (D-26, both also ex-USN vessels). Four days later the Belgrano group was detected patrolling the Burdwood Bank, south of the islands, by the nuclear attack submarine HMS Conqueror. British Commander Chris Wreford-Brown was in a quandary: while the vessels represented the most powerful naval surface force the Argentine Navy could muster, and was clearly a threat to British forces, it was also 20 miles outside the 200-mile exclusion zone surrounding the islands, and thus not a 'target of opportunity.' The submarine reported the contact and waited for instructions while stalking the Argentine force for the next 36 hours. After consultation at cabinet level,and with the commander of the British Task Force, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed that the group was a threat, and ordered the submarine to attack. By this time the warships were 40 miles outside the exclusion zone, headed away from the Falklands and back towards Argentina at a leisurely 10-knots, making them an easy target, and the attack a source of controversy to this day.

The British sub carried both WWII type torpedoes, and more modern homing torpedoes. But the newer models were unproven and troublesome, so there was little debate as to what weapons to use. At around 1600 hrs on May 2, Conqueror fired three conventional "straight running" Mk 8 mod 4 torpedoes (each with a 800lb warhead), two of which hit the General Belgrano. One struck abreast the boiler room, while the second hit 5 seconds later and severed the bow. The third torpedo may have struck the destroyer Hipolto Bouchard and failed to explode, or it may have missed clean. The bow hit was very survivable, but the first torpedo hit in the worst possible place on the cruiser's hull: right between the two biggest compartments on the ship. General Belgrano lost all power instantly, and several fires flared up. Communications went out instantly, so no "SOS" was sent. The crew remained calm, and began to fight the fires as best they could, to shore up bulkheads, and to set up portable pumps. The wounded were carried out on deck, efforts began to help those trapped below, and protective clothing was given to those rousted out of their quarters by the explosion. But from the very start it was obvious that the ship was doomed. Damage control was hampered by the large number of trainees in the ship's crew, and by the fact that the ship's commander, Captain Héctor E. Bonzohad, had stood his crew down from action stations, wrongly assuming that his command was both safe and non-threatening in international waters. Apparently, the British clarification that any warship could be attacked outside the zone was not shared with Captain Bonzohad. The cruiser took on a rapid list to port, and the order to abandon her was given at 1624 hrs. Her crew took to the inflatable life rafts, often squeezing in many extra men to compensate for the rafts damaged or lost in the explosion. The British submariners reported that the destroyers executed a depth charge attack, but in fact they were unaware that Belgrano was in trouble until the cruiser foundered. Lacking modern ASW weapons, they were ordered to dispersed lest they also be attacked, one to the northwest and the other in a southerly direction. Thier passive sonars heard the sounds of Belgrano's boilers exploding as she sank, which was what the British mistook for a poorly-aimed depth charge attack. HMS Conqueror escaped unscathed to report that she had damaged the cruiser, while the General Belgrano slipped beneath the waves at 1645, taking 323 Argentine sailors and all hope of a peaceful settlement with her. In Argentina, a powerful storm prevented search planes from flying in the area of the sinking until the next morning, so it was assumed that the ship had been lost will all hands; those not lost in the sinking would surely perish in the storm.

The weather was very overcast, dusk was already falling, and one hour after the sinking it was dark. The water was cold enough to kill swimmers in a few short minutes, while the heavy seas made handling the rafts difficult. Those in the rafts were constantly wet, and suffered badly from exposure and frostbite: the temperature was below freezing, and the wind blew a steady 45 MPH. There was little drinking water, and no rations. Burn victims were incapable of caring for themselves, and were tended to by the others, while many men became very nauseous from the endless roller-coaster ride of a small raft bobbing in mountainous waves. The men tried to huddle together for warmth, but they constantly had to shift from side to side in the raft, to keep it from turning over as it crested each wave. Sleep was nearly impossible, and would have proven deadly: men had to keep their extremities moving, or they would rapidly freeze to death. The next morning the skies were clearer and search planes were sighted. But the survivors were unable to signal the passing aircraft, as they were poorly trained on the WWII-era 'Bengal Lights', and the instructions were written in English. A second long night closed in, and not until the early morning of the second day, some 30 hours after the sinking, did rescue ships arrive. The search pilots had spotted first one, and then a second raft, but were at the extreme range of their fuel supply and had been unable to stay in the area. One by one the liferafts were gathered up; those that were overcrowded faired the best, while some contained only bodies: in rafts with few occupants, there was not enough body heat to keep the men alive. Other rafts were never found at all. 770 survivors were recovered by ARA and Chilean vessels, the last after enduring over 40 hours of 30-foot waves and the freezing-cold. It is a near-miracle that anyone survived at all. The calmness and discipline displayed by the crew, the protective clothing, and the fact that the crew had been fed shortly before the attack kept the death toll from being much higher. If you are an opera fan, you probably have heard of the internationally renowned Argentine tenor Dario Volonté, who was one of the survivors of the sinking.

In Argentina, the government and press labeled the British as butchers, and cited the sinking as the reason for discontinuing negotiations that had started to show promise. The Videla dictatorship had a history of brutality and deceit, and was seen as having started the war anyway, so the rest of the world had little sympathy, and gave little credence to the Argentine claims that the ship was sailing away from the war zone, returning from a harmless training mission. The rest of the Argentine Navy's surface ships stayed close to port for the rest of the war, though their submarines caused the British some worry, and their pilots proved to be formidable enemies. This incident accounted for more than half of the Argentine casualties in the war, a war that proved a debacle for the Argentine military. The defeat, together with a spiraling economic crisis, provoked mass unrest that led to the downfall of the regime.

At the time of the attack, it was heralded as a great military triumph in the UK. The headline of the notoriously sleazy London newspaper The Sun taunted "GOTCHA!" as they broke the story, but quickly retracted the headline as it was learned that the ship had sunk rather than just been damaged, and that nearly 1,200 men were feared dead. Critics of the war soon attacked the Thatcher government for sinking the ship outside the exclusion zone, but the sinking was defended because the Belgrano task force might have been part of a coordinated attack on the approaching British fleet. There were two other Argentine task forces at sea, including one with three frigates, and one with a carrier and two destroyers, so it was feared that the three groups would attack the British fleet from the North, West, and South. The British also thought it was possible that modern anti-ship missiles had been added to the cruiser (they had not), which would have allowed her to join the attack. This was a legitimate concern, as the carrier was indeed trying to intercept the British, and this reason would have been sufficient. (In reality the three groups were poorly coordinated, so only the carrier group attempted to engage)

But the Thatcher government went one step too far: for good measure, they also releasing the story that the ship was headed TOWARDS the war zone, not away from it. But then Ministry of Defense civil servant Clive Ponting leaked confidential documents to the Labour MP Tam Dalyell, which noted that the Argentine cruiser had been moving away from the islands, not towards them as officially claimed. The British public was outraged at the lie, and Margaret Thatcher's opponents tried to make an issue of the matter for the 1983 election. But while the action damaged Britain's good standing with the rest of the world, the public was very forgiving in the wake of a British victory, and she was reelected easily. Mr Ponting was later tried under the Official Secrets Act, but found not guilty. Eventually even the Argentine Defense Ministry issued a report in 1994, in which they recognized the sinking as a legitimate act of war.

Following the war, the people of Argentina harbored much resentment not only at their own government for starting the war by invading the islands, but also towards the British for attacking the Belgrano outside the British-defined war zone and thus ending any hopes of averting a shooting war. The government was interested in mending fences, but families of the men killed on the Belgrano filed a human rights action against the British government. They, and some British citizens & politicians, claim that the ship was illegally attacked outside the exclusion zone to intentionally end the peace negotiations, thus ensuring a war that would boost the popularity of the Thatcher government. Argentine courts did not buy their arguments, and attempts to extradite Margaret Thatcher to face war crimes charges failed. The families then filed an action in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in early 2000, seeking "indemnity for all the deaths" (in other words, "money"). But their suit was dismissed on the grounds that any such claims should have been pursued in British courts first, and that the deadline for filing a claim in the European Court had expired six months after the sinking.

In 2003 a National Geographic expedition was mounted with the assistance of the Argentine Navy to locate the wreck of the General Belgrano at the reported sinking position, about 100 miles off the southern coast of Argentina in 13,800 feet of water. After two weeks at sea, having covered 300 square miles, the expedition was called off in the face of 30-foot waves and 60-MPH winds.

The following photos of the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano were taken by a surviving crewman, and are used by permission.

A memorial to the 323 lost crewmen stands at Ushuaia